The actor, who is all set to write a column called ‘Chandan Roy Sanyal says’ for BollywoodLife.com, talks to us about life after Kaminey and his upcoming list of challenging roles

Chandan Roy Sanyal – the actor who surprised critics and audience with his Bollywood debut as Shahid Kapoor’s quirky friend in Vishal Bharadwaj’s Kaminey – has been quietly working on new characters and films. After his successful outing in F.A.L.T.U and a not-so-successful run with Tell Me O Khuda, Chandan has been spending time on projects that offer him challenges.

When we caught up with the actor recently, he was busy preparing to play his first out and out romantic lead role for a bilingual movie. “I love watching romantic movies. Films like Once and Let The Right One In are some of favourite love stories,” he says. Watching these offbeat love stories is a part of Chandan’s preparation for his role. He spends a good month getting into the skin of his character. “I have to feel like it from the inside. I have to get into that zone emotionally…the mush zone. So I have been reading romantic literature and watching love stories.”

The actor whose last big release of Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children, also needs to feel like a lover boy physically. “I play a young Marwari boy in this film. I might go in for some treatments for my hair and face. I need to groom myself for this loverboy role,” Chandan laughs.

But before getting into the romantic zone, Chandan worked on a dark thriller called Prague which was screened at several festivals, including the Berlin Film Festival and OSIAN. “I play a troubled architect with a split personality who meets a Czech girl and his life goes for a spin. The story is set in Prague, which has a gloomy feel to it, and even the architecture lends itself to a psychological thriller like this one,” he explains.

The actor has been patiently waiting for the right films and characters to fall into his filmi lap. And with his not-so-mainstream looks, he is aware that he is not really typical Bollywood hero material. But his strength lies in acting skills that have been polished through his theatre experience.

Even then, he says that while Vishal Bharadwaj‘s Kaminey has been his most acclaimed role to date, he cannot rest on his laurels for too long. “I cannot expect Kaminey to be my wild card entry. Aise dhaasoo roles baar baar nahin aate (these kind of amazing roles don’t come to you that often). You get corrupt when you think like that. You gain something from every movie experience though. Even though Tell Me O Khuda didn’t do well, I gained from it. I got to meet Rishi Kapoor and talk to him about his father. I made a friend in Esha Deol. I also got to work with actors like Jackky Bhagnani and Riteish Deshmukh who are chilled out guys like me, in F.A.L.T.U. This adds a lot of perspective to you,” he says.

In fact, he finds that lots of youngsters associate him more with F.A.L.T.U than with Kaminey. “Each film has its own set of viewers. Most youngsters on Facebook talk to me about F.A.L.T.U. They don’t even know about Kaminey. Then there is the regional film audience that knows me because of my Bengali film Aparajita Tumi.”

Here’s hoping that Chandan manages to reach out to more movie fans with every new film.